Police Depts Militarizing To Combat 'Returning Vets With PTSD'

[G_j]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/09/1328272/-Police-Depts-Militarizing-To-Deal-With-Returning-Vets-With-PTSD



TUE SEP 09, 2014 AT 03:35 AM PDT

The Guardian's Ed Pilkington attended the Urban Shield trade show in Oakland, CA, where manufacturers of weapons, armored-vehicles, body armor etc etc are clamoring to sell this stuff to police departments across America and the world.

On three sides of the hall, giant black tactical armoured vehicles are stationed, wheels chest-height, sides armour-plated to resist an AK-47 round or blast of a roadside bomb, roofs decked out with spotlights, surveillance cameras and swivel turrets able to house machine guns. One of the vehicles, the aptly named Sentinel – 21ft long, 17,500lbs in weight, and costing $250,000 and up – was developed by a Florida-based company called International Armored Group that began supplying the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan. “With all that experience in blast resistance, we decided to branch off into tactical vehicles tailored to police departments at home,” said the company’s Sally Stefova.
We've come a long, long way from Car 54, Where Are You? and Adam 12.
In fact, the idea of patrol officers doing their jobs in Ford Crown Vics and armed with .38s and nightsticks is almost quaint, like old episodes of Flash Gordon, with rocket-ships trailing smoke and sparks and astronauts wearing jodhpurs.

Pilkington is somewhat taken aback by all this:

Given the national soul-searching about militarized policing that Ferguson inspired, you might expect to see a muted, self-reflective Urban Shield this year. Not so, judging from the hardware on display on the convention floor.
As you enter the vast exhibition space you are accosted by assault rifles, gas masks, helmets, tactical knives, robots, drones, night-vision devices and countless other references to the war zone. The poster for the Urban Shield event itself shows a police officer from Oakland’s local Alameda sheriff’s department wearing a helmet and goggles and pointing an assault rifle directly out at the viewer. He crouches above a clock that has stopped symbolically at 9:11, alongside the words “Critical training 4 critical times”.

9/11 symbolism. How very subtle. And appropriate. After all, it was NYPD officers in armored cars equipped with .50 calibre machine-guns that prevented the attack on the World Trade Center (are you sure about this?-Ed.)

..more..

[Mnemosyne]

1. Just wtf. nt

[99th_Monkey]

2. Actually, police departments are recruiting & HIRING returning Vets w/PTSD

http://www.policeone.com/health-fitness/articles/6222919-PTSD-and-police-Hiring-and-retaining-war-veterans-in-our-ranks/

I wish they'd make up their fucking minds.

Actually this represents a chillingly juxtaposed ultimatum embedded in their PR: "Come workout your PTSD all over peaceful domestic dissenters OR we will assume you are "one of them" i.e. that you've denounced violence as a life-style, so are an 'enemy of the state'."

[951-Riverside]

3. This may be new to many of you here but it is certainly no secret. (Fast forward to 1:47)

Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department states, "When I first started we really didn't have the violence that we see today," adding, "The weaponry is totally different now that it was in the beginning of my career, plus, you have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build IEDs and to defeat law enforcement techniques."

[Octafish]

5. 9/11 Changed Everything

Like America into a Police State.

[G_j]

7. and it was just amazing

how all the pieces fell into place...

[Nuclear Unicorn]

6. The police are either clueless morons or malignant liars. nt